Although sport diving can be fun, exciting, and physically demanding, there are a variety of potential hazards that must be avoided. In particular, sport diving can be exceedingly dangerous if the diver becomes disoriented or light-headed. Thus, it is desirable for a diver to be able to monitor the rate at which he is consuming air. This task is complicated because the amount of air a diver actually breathes varies with depth even though the diver's breathing rate remains unchanged. For example, if a diver consumes 20 psi per minute while breathing at a normal rate on the surface, he will consume 80 psi per minute if breathing at the same rate at a depth of 99 feet. Thus, for a diver to easily monitor his breathing rate, it is essential that the rate at which he is consuming air be normalized to eliminate the variable of depth.
There are several dive computers available today that display conventional dive parameters such as the amount of air pressure remaining in the user's compressed-air tank, the depth of the user and in some instances the temperature of the surrounding water. Although display of these dive parameters provides the user with a "snap-shot" of his current conditions, they do not allow the user to monitor his rate of air consumption.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a dive computer that calculates and displays the user's breathing parameter, which is indicative of the rate at which air pressure in the user's compressed-air tank is decreasing normalized with respect to the depth of the user. Another object of the present invention is to provide a method for calculating the user's breathing parameter.
A diver's breathing parameter is essentially a measure of his breathing efficiency. The more a person dives, the more efficient his breathing should become. Thus, another object of the present invention is to provide a dive computer that stores the diver's breathing parameter in memory for later retrieval so that a diver can track his progress from dive to dive.
Since a diver will not normally stop breathing or suddenly triple his breathing rate, his breathing parameter will not normally go to either an extremely low or high level, and will not normally undergo rapid changes. Thus, a diver's breathing parameter provides an indication of whether the diver is unduly stressed or in trouble and an indication of whether the diver's equipment, including the dive computer itself, is operating correctly. Accordingly, another object of the present invention is to provide a dive computer that provides a visible warning and sounds an audible alarm when the diver's breathing parameter either undergoes a rapid change or reaches an extremely low or high level.